The boy looked around. There were a lot of dead. “Where’s Fleat?” he asked again, more worry in his throat than the first time. The little hobbe was nowhere in sight. If he had survived the fight–if he was alive and uninjured–then he ought have returned.
One step out into the carnage. And another. He started to search among the cut and hacked bodies. Some were already discolouring: turning bluish and purplish and grey. Some looked more asleep than dead. He began to feel a coldness move delicately up and down his spine. He searched, but not for much longer.
Fleat had clearly plummeted from somewhere far up above. The owlet-child was split open along one side of his chest. It was impossible to tell if the rupture was the result of a draig’s claw, or the impact from a terrible fall. In death, he had changed back into his hobbe body, as it seemed most of the other transformed hobs-houlard had also.
The boy squatted down. He did his best to close Fleat’s eyes, but the bones of the face were smashed and distorted by hitting hard stone.
He remember how Fleat had shivered so badly when describing the awfulness of being changed from owl-to-hobbe mid-flight, and the long fall that followed. He remembered the terror of it.
And here he was.
Fleat was naked, of course. Remnants of feathers dusted his skin, but that was all. From the looks of it, his body had been further twisted and crushed among the rocks by tread of feet: the fighting with the draig had been fierce here. At a glance around, there were a lot of dead hobbes in and among the rocky crevices–each of them with their own shrouds of feathers in hues of owl brown and grey and russet.
It seemed so wrong. So ignoble. Just sad and awful and wrong.
Standing, the boy felt strange and dizzy. He was distant from himself for a moment, as he looked down at the dead Fleat. He felt as if he himself were somehow soaring high in the air, looking down at the crushed and the dead below. But the trick of the mind passed, and the illusion of distance settled back into a strange, dull emptiness. There was nothing left here that was Fleat any longer. The face no longer held any expression of the moods that had so often welled up. His arms and legs were not even held in a way that was reminiscent of how Fleat held himself, awake or asleep. What remained was just a broken shape.
Objectively, the boy knew that very many had died. It felt selfish to kneel down again and feel his own small rush of pain and anger: and all this for just one of the dead; one face among many; familiar and known. But, it was just the same impossible to push away the shock and the grief. He couldn’t do anything but let it overwhelm him. And really, he didn’t want to.
If he cried or keened or wailed like a child, he afterward never knew.
Those minutes were ashy-tasting and blank in his memory: a grey, awful span of scraped canvas, barren of detail. So, grief came. And it stole his ability to think until it had poured itself out of himself.
All that he remembered–later–was that by the time Caewen found him, he was exhausted, barely able to see through hazed vision, breathing erratically.
She hesitated, but approached, and put a gentle hand on him. She said, “I’m sorry, child. You’re not meant for a day such as this. I suppose none of us are.”
She eased herself down next to him, next to Fleat.
And they sat there together for a time in silence.
As the sun set.
As the grief came and went.